Yeah, some guy in Australia, I believe, got sentenced to jail for pedophilia because he had pornographic pictures of cartoon characters, but it's OK for government employed perverts to be ogling our kids in the name of "safety". Top grade job UK government, fucking A+.

OK, let me break down fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument into simple sentences for you, because you seem unable to wrap your mind around it.

-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.

-- Government chooses an open, unencumbered with patents format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- Anyone can write software that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can freely choose whichever products they fancy.

And you seem to be absolutely right, only evil socialist governments and the pinko commies who've elected them seem to understand these two simple concepts. Hoorah for libertarianism.

At the very least Apple, and I'd presume Microsoft too, although I don't really know (or care), does not require bank or tax information if you don't plan on selling your app. The developer account registration does not ask you for that information and once you've got your developer credentials, you already have an active contract with the iTunes App store for worldwide distribution of free apps. The developer in TFA claims that Palm asked him to provide PayPal seller credentials (or whatever you call them), even though his only two apps are free.

On the other hand, you have to consider the fact that the weapons that have been used in the past in place of this "sound cannon" for crowd control - rubber bullets and wooden batons, for example - are significantly more likely to cause bodily harm, including permanent damage and "fatal aneurisms". And they are significantly harder to escape.

I'd say crippled is too strong of a word here. Form the libdispatch project main page, linked in the blurb above:

GCD is not tied to the kernel and a parallel programing library (like OpenMP) won't suffice, because none of the ones that I've seen so far is as easy to use as GCD backed blocks.

GCD is pretty clean and, since both libdispatch and llvm are open source (and under BSD-like licenses), it and the code written against it are infinitely portable.

No it doesn't. Since the average executable on linux is static code linked to dynamic libraries made up of static code, you get your "selector uniquing" at compile time - you don't get a method selector description, instead you get a pre-calculated and already unique address of the method or function.

It is a tradeoff. You get to worry about the performance of shared library selector uniquing, but you get all the benefits of dynamic language and runtime. In practice such inefficiencies matter most in cases where you are very constrained for resources - e.g. on a phone, as hinted in TFA. I doubt in the context of the rest of the performance and efficiency improvements in Snow Leopard and on a reasonably modern computer, the 1/10 of a second or the few megabytes of memory saved matter all that much.

Apple may be plenty arrogant, but it still is not an apt analogy. In order to be, it has to be analogous in the first place. Whatever you may think of Apple, their behavior in the recent past has demonstrated that they are not the kind of company that would rest on their laurels. In fact some still quote the fact that Apple killed the iPod mini at the peak of its popularity to replace it with the nano, something that very few other companies would do - most would milk the mini for all its worth before moving on. So yeah, the grandparent is completely right to say - "Apple don't seem to be taking any naps anytime soon."

iTunes app *reviews* are not a bug reporting system. Make it abundantly clear to your customers, probably best in the description blurb on the apps' page on the store, where they can express their griefs - support page, support email, bugtracker, etc., and equally clear that nothing that doesn't go through that channel will be considered or responded to. Problem solved.

As for the ratings thing - are you absolutely sure that the rating actually impacts your app enough to justify your getting so wound up about it? Because for many apps the target audience is not under 17 in the first place - and not because of objectionable content but simply because teens by and large don't care about body fat calculators or cookbook apps. And more importantly, the only way Apple enforces these ratings is through the parental controls settings in iTunes and on the device. I'd wager that nearly all of your customers will not have parental controls turned on at all.

Otherwise I do agree with you - there is plenty to be improved with the App store and iTunes connect. But it's not going to happen faster because people are ranting on teh intertubes.

Your comment is a mix of bullshit and speculation.

First, it is not marketshare that creates a monopoly, it's leverage. And Apple has hardly any leverage over the mobile phone, or smartphone, or even portable music player markets. Hell, they don't even have leverage over the online music distribution market - their competitors got to sell DRM-free higher bitrate music for almost a year before all music labels agreed to let Apple do it, and only after Apple conceded flat pricing. So, yeah I'd love to see how would regulators argue that Apple constitutes a monopoly.

As for the latter part of your comment, I've already demonstrated that, not only is your claim that content owners may not allow or hinder competitors to iTunes a completely baseless speculation, but in reality the situation is probably exactly the opposite - music labels are scared shitless by iTunes' huge popularity and are willing to give its competitors much more leeway in an attempt to get marketshare back from Apple.

At the end of it all, Apple are in no way preventing anyone form creating an alternative to their iTMS/iTunes/iPod/iPhone package - either by creating their own music distribution service and their own jukebox/library software, OR by partnering with companies that have ALREADY created such services and software.

Yeah, there is no quick, easy and free way for Palm to create the same great user experience as Apple, but Apple didn't get either to where they are quickly, easily or for free.

Actually not even that much, you can buy a copy of Tiger on eBay $50 or less. The grandparent is trolling for shits and giggles, so no point in trying to refute him.

Both NX flag and ASLR are present Leopard. For a number of compatibility reasons they are not implemented as extensively as they are on other systems, but it's disingenuous to say Mac OS X doesn't have them.

If you go look at Jordan Hubbard's From the Server Room to Your Pocket presentation:
http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa08/tech/hubbard_talk.pdf
or listen to it:
http://www.usenix.org/media/events/lisa08/tech/mp3/hubbard.mp3

you'd realize that Charlie Miller is milking his 15 min of fame for all they are worth with his incendiary comments - basically trolling for publicity.

Oh, guess what - it turns out that of the 8 tests, which Firefox 3.1b2 fails (at least on my machine) exactly zero are CSS3 related. firefox fails:

#26 - on performance (I can live with this one)
#70 - check for well-formedness of UTF-8 encoded XML
#71 - HTML 4.0 Transitional
#75 through # 80 - a bunch of SVG tests (SVG fonts and SVG animation stuff)


Not only is the argument of you lot mighty hypocritical - ACID matters when Firefox passes it and IE doesn't, but it's irrelevant when Firefox fails, but you also don't seem to know what the hell are you talking about.

I didn't say ACID3 tests full compliance with all those standards. I don't think I even implied that. What I pointed out, though, is that the test is about much more than "small rendering bugs, and CSS3". And although, yes, the ACID tests do test quirks, often not even covered by the respective standard, its goal is an important one - to make sure that all browsers are equally quirky.

Yeah, you're right - it's all unimportant shit. Totally irrelevant. Come to think of it, the Mozilla folks should not try to implement any of the stuff ACID3 tests at all. You know, 'cause they are just that cool.